Myths About the Consumerization of IT

I can't go a day without hearing something or getting asked about the Consumerization of IT (C of IT). It was a hot topic last year and it continues to garner a lot of attention this year already. But there are many facets to it. It can range from; companies allowing employees to bring their own devices to work to using social networking sites while on the job to storing and retrieving data from cloud storage. These are just some of the obvious examples today, who knows what will get thrown into this bucket in the future.

There was one bit of news I read about in January and it was from a survey conducted last November by Avanade. They commissioned a survey of 605 executives and business leaders from around the world on the trends (and myths) surrounding the use of personal technologies in the enterprise. There were a few myths I found particularly interesting because Quest will be launching our own mobile framework this week.

Myth 1 - Businesses are resisting the Consumerization of IT

On the contrary, they are embracing it. 73 percent said that the growing use of employee owned technology is a top priority in their organization.

Myth 4 - Personal devices in the workplace are used for checking e-mail and browsing Facebook

Enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP and Expense Tracking are finding their way to personal devices. The respondents said that CRM (45%), Time and Expense Tracking (44%), and Enterprise Resource Planning (38%) applications are being used on personal devices.

Myth 6 - Consumer technologies with built-in security measures are safe for use in the enterprise

The key finding here is that the majority of companies have already encountered a security breach as a result of the C of IT. Across every industry, country and company size that responded to the survey all said that the number 1 risk to the Consumerization of IT is security.

One of the best quotes in the article was; 'Today, the value of consumer technologies is vastly underleveraged. Most employees do not have access to the same business data on personal devices like tablets as they do on their company issued computer.' Well with the release of Quest's Mobile IT this week we plan to empower the people and their devices.